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Re: GOTCHA!


Subject: Re: GOTCHA!
From: Tyler Baker <tyler@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 19:46:57 -0500

Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:

> From: Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> >Hi Oren.
> >
> >For output JScript I've been using what MS recommends ie.,
> >
> >          //<xsl:comment>
> >          <![CDATA[
> >               ...Script...
> >          ]]>
> >          //</xsl:comment>
> >
> >...which seems to work fine for the IE5b2 parser. Not sure how it would
> >fare for XT.
>
> Wouldn't, and rightly so. The fact that there's a CDATA in the input just
> protects the characters when being parsed. There's no way in XSL to ask for
> a CDATA section in the output. Actually, an <xsl:cdata> tag would be the
> closest possible to the <xsl:not-xml> tag I'd like. It falls under the
> current intent; it ensures the output is valid XML; it is cleaner then using
> the <xsl:comment> tag; and it can be used in the same way to embed non-XML
> code in the output.
>
> Any reason we have <xsl:comment> and not <xsl:cdata>? Any chance we may get
> <xsl:cdata>?

In an XML Formatter I have, the proprietary Document interface has a list of
entity names and values.  When writing out character data or attribute values, a
somewhat expensive function searches and replaces values in the entity list with
entity names.  Yes this approach has problems, but it is better than nothing for
a lot of situations.

I was wondering that in an XSL Processor if it would be nice to have this same
sort of feature so that you could in essence escape special entities in HTML
upon output like &nbsp;

The best way to use this I would think for HTML would be to:

(1) Define a special character that represents &nbsp such as some rarely used
character in the Unicode table.
(2) Parse the XML source tree and XSL stylesheet
(3) In the XSL Processor build up the entity table to escape all entities with
the value of that special character (or string of characters) which represent
&nbsp;

This I feel would be more natural than trying to use CDATA all over the place
for escaping HTML entities.

Any comments here...

Tyler


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